Hack Ideas Thread
- A racing game where you play as characters from EarthBound;
- A Pokémon game where you travel through time to solve problems.
A Romhack community where you can share your creations with the world.
https://romhackplaza.org/community/
Darkstalkers 3 (Sony PlayStation): I recently found out that Donovan has his newer improved sprites from Vampire Hunter 2/Vampire Savior 2 in this port, but they only appear if you choose the D.F. Power mode, I would like to see someone make them be his default sprites?
Vampire Savior (Sega Saturn): A hack that will add these improvements to it:
Give Donovan his improved sprites from Vampire Hunter 2/Vampire Savior 2.
Fix two text errors in the English mode version of these two endings:
In J.Talbain's ending, change John to Jon.
In Hsien-Ko's ending, change Lin-Lin to Mei-Ling.
Vampire Chronicle (Sega Dreamcast): A hack that will add all of these improvements to it:
1.Translate the game to English, just copy the text info for the win quotes, Jedah and both endings from the American PSP port. You might have to create new text for the save & load screens.
2.Give some of the fighters their English names, you can probably grab them from the American PSP port.
3.Have the CPU use the default palettes for all the fighters, instead of the alternate ones.
4.Change the palettes for the player select screen to the ones from Vampire Savior 1, it's using the ones from Vampire Savior 2.
5.Switch the palettes for the background stages to their original ones, the only time it should use the alternate palettes is when you fight the Mid-Boss and the secret Oboro boss fight.
6.Have J.Talbain, Rikuo and Sasquatch appear more often in arcade mode, the CPU rarely chooses them. Have them appear in the stages they appear the most on from Vampire Savior 1: https://wiki.gbl.gg/w/Vampire_Savior/Se ... babilities
7.Restore the unused hidden fighter Dark J.Talbain, I think he's still in the ROM. His winning theme is still there.
8.Give Donovan his improved sprites from Vampire Hunter 2/Vampire Savior 2, I think they might be in the ROM.
Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower (Sony PSP): A hack that will add all of these improvements to it:
1.Change the name of Jedah's stage back to being called "The Fetus of God" once again.
2.Restore the "DOWN!" text that's suppose to appear after you won a round.
3.Have the CPU use the default palettes for all the fighters, instead of the alternate ones.
4.Change the palettes for the player select screen to the ones from Vampire Savior 1, it's using the ones from Vampire Savior 2.
5.Switch the palettes for the background stages to their original ones, the only time it should use the alternate palettes is when you fight the Mid-Boss and the secret Oboro boss fight.
6.Have J.Talbain, Rikuo and Sasquatch appear more often in arcade mode, the CPU rarely chooses them. Have them appear in the stages they appear the most on from Vampire Savior 1: https://wiki.gbl.gg/w/Vampire_Savior/Se ... babilities
7.Restore the unused hidden fighter Dark J.Talbain, he's still in the ROM. His winning theme is also still there as well.
8.Give Donovan his improved sprites from Vampire Hunter 2/Vampire Savior 2, I think they might be in the ROM.
Vampire: Darkstalkers Collection (Sony PlayStation 2): A hack that will add all of these improvements to it:
1.Translate the game to English.
2.Give Donovan his improved sprites from Vampire Hunter 2/Vampire Savior 2, for the arranged mode of Vampire Savior 1.
3.Give Vampire Hunter 2 the unused Night Warriors 2 title screen: https://tcrf.net/Vampire_Savior_2_%26_V ... rnate_Logo
Excite Bike - a hack where you can pick the color of your racer with select button before you choose a track
Harvest Moon GBC - Fix the bug where the harvest sprites keep your tools they're supposed to upgrade. I think this could be done by making their "Wait 24 hours and talk to me" requirement be tied to in-game time rather than irl time, as well as make it so they only offer to upgrade one till at a time
Land Forger - A minor update to this otherwise perfect Super Mario Land editor that allows it to read graphics directly from the rom, allowing for more ease when working with heavily edited tilesets
There’s are some hack ideas for games on genesis
Captain America and the avengers
Mercs
Midnight Resistance
Smash TV
I’m sure there’s more that could use a lot of love
Shining Force: Make it so that character/unit stats don't lower upon promotion. I'm glad that they did away with this feature in the second game as it was quite annoying and made level grinding even more tedious than it needed to be.
I would like to see the 0xED hex editor get an unofficial update, so it will work properly on the newer operating systems of the iMac.
F-Zero (Super Nintendo): A hack that will replace the results music with the one from F-Zero 99.
Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom and Shadow over Mystara (Arcade & Sega Saturn): A hack that will change the green blood to red.
Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Nintendo 64): A hack that will add these improvements to it:
Restores the title screen music from Castlevania 64.
You can jump while holding the nitro.
When you load your save, the upgrades for your weapons are still there.
Guess I'll repost this from the previous forum here:
Hi all! I decided it was time to start documenting this idea to organize my thoughts and get some feedback and advise.
Concept
A stage expansion for the original 8-bit Casltevania that extends the game and adds some new content.
Intended Changes
Swap around 2 bosses.
Split Block 4 (Stages 10 thru 12) into separate levels and pad them with some new stages.
Split Block 6 (Stages 16 thru 18) into separate levels and pad them with some new stages.
Add 2 extra bosses for the new blocks.
Add a new song.
It would end up looking something like this:
Block 1 (Stages 1/2/3) Phantom Bat, "Vampire Killer"
Block 2 (Stages 4/5/6) Queen Medusa, "Stalker"
Block 3 (Stages 7/8/9) The Mummies, "Wicked Child"
Block 4 (Stages 10/A/B) Gillman, "Walking on the Edge"
Block 5 (Stages C/11/12) The Wolfman, (if I can get permission) "Howling Hybrid"
Block 6 (Stages 13/14/15) The Creature & Hunchback, "Heart of Fire"
Block 7 (Stages 16/17/D) Death, "Out of Time"
Block 8 (Stages E/F/18) Dracula, "Nothing to Lose"
So stages A thru F would be brand new ones.
As far as game play, I would like to consider making some alterations based on some of the early design documents found in the "History of Castlevania" digital book that came with the Castlevania Anniversary Collection.
I think this would mostly consist of adding new power-ups and sub-weapons and switching around how some of them work.
If I wanted to get really crazy, I'd want to try adding in the diagonal whip attacks, but just expanding the stages and adding 2 bosses seems like a huge endeavor.
Bogaa gave me some good input already that I'm going to look into info to start things off.
But if anyone has any other suggestions, feel free to post!
EDIT:
From GoldenArc:
This looks promising.
I know there are a couple of docs about music and enemy data (archived by RHDN). And you might be able to learn a thing or two from the hacks of Optomon, Dr. Mario, et al. Chorus of Mysteries and Holy Relics have a lot of changes.
Also, Castlevania Modding is a good resource. But you might want to check NesDev for technical info.
As far as game play, I would like to consider making some alterations based on some of the early design documents found in the "History of Castlevania" digital book that came with the Castlevania Anniversary Collection.
Sounds interesting. What kind of ideas did they have?
Never answered this directly, but the first thing that stood out was that early planning seems to have included both a diagonally-upward whip lash and a diagonally-downward whip lash. These were possible because the original controller layout was rather different. There was no jump button,but like Vampire Killer, you would have pressed up to jump. And it seems like attacking involved pressing 'A' + a direction for the whip and 'B' + a direction for sub-weapons. Some of this remains in Vampire Killer in the way that the Holy Water and Time Freeze are used.
A lot of the power-ups were different or entirely unused.
The wall meat was originally a speed up item dropped by monsters (similar to the Boots in Vampire Killer).
The "Cross (small)" is basically the rosary, but as a sub-weapon and it specifically doesn't work on bosses.
The classic POW item from many previous Konami games was an enemy drop that restored health (similar to the Red Crystal Ball in Vampire Killer, may have been mixed up by the wall meat item above).
Garlic was a "Limited Item" (instantly used upon pick up) that "Keeps enemies away" (similar to the Silver Cross in Vampire Killer).
Pistol with Silver Bullets was a sub-weapon specifically for werewolves (which didn't even end up being in the game).
The stake (which ended up being used in CV2) was a sub-weapon required to defeat Dracula.
The Transformation item allowed you to turn into a werewolf for a few seconds.
Guardian Spirit (bird) pretty much worked like the falcon in 8 Eyes but with limited uses.
The "Pocket Watch" was an enemy drop that "Adds time to the game timer (or stops it for a period of time)".
The "Bible" sub-weapon would make the player "invincible" as opposed to making you invisible like the "Limited Item", "Invisibility Potion".
And lastly, "Excalibur" is the same as the "Cross (small), but it is effective against bosses, too.
From Bogaa:
Here are the responses from the previous forum...
Since I was mentioned I had like to make my inputs more clear on the idea. It is possible to add new entry for doors, checkpoints, secrets and entities.. (What would make a new block)
You could do that in the disassembly where it should also be no issue to move things to make the space for it.Since the tables you like to address are all editable in staks it would make the tool unusable for the new block. In the game.ini file of steak you can address the location of existing tables but adding new entry like you suggest did never work for me.
You said you would feel comfortable to work on a new editor with game-maker to overcome the tool problem. A new editor will give a lot of opportunity for many things.
Making this changes as your first take in assembly seems too much. Would not recommend that at all for learning! Making a new editor for a new game seems more reasonable since you just look for the data to edit and you would not need to worry about all the things you can break while adding new things. Better focus to make a boss or item to see how that goes.
Instead of making all this changes in the last bank. I would just work on bank 5 and give the scenes and blocks more space to make larger areas. Then you will just have to update the enemy tracker data, cam-lock table and the stake game.ini for the new locations of the level data. In this scenario you could keep using stakes what will be a big help making changes to the levels.
In case you need inspiration how to edit enemies and bosses I share my hacks with the src files. You can ignore the music and MMC5 stuff.. in case you had like to use FamiStudio-Engine. This would not be possible in the vanilla game since I needed to add SRAM. You would at last need to convert to a mapper that supports SRAM. Or work with the original music engine. A other option is to just use my hack as a starting point. It is easy to remove all the code for the bosses and use a vanilla ROM to start fresh. Then making music is as easy as exporting from famiStudio and assemble along a new project.
Final Fantasy Legend 3 - a hack that skips all non-essential text in battle other than status effect alerts, speeding up the pace of battles
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (Game Boy Advance): A hack that will add all the improvements from the Japanese version to the international versions.
Super Mario 64 - an addendum patch for SM64 Chaos Edition where you have infinite air and don't take poison damage.
A half-serious Streets of Rage hack with old Yu-Gi-Oh! characters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HM9tyNkUAg